Fiction: Predator by Patricia Cornwell

A bit of a puzzler

Kay Scarpetta is now based at the National Forensic Academy in Florida, but Patricia Cornwell seems in two minds about turning her creation into a Sunshine State sleuth. Blow Fly, two novels ago, was set in Louisiana, while Trace returned to Virginia; and although Predator does find Scarpetta working on cases near the academy, it shuttles restlessly between the south and a wintry Massachusetts. Possibly, though, its fragmented storytelling reflects an author bored with her heroine: here the forensic pathologist is no more prominent than her troubled lesbian niece Lucy, her irascible sidekick Pete Marino and her lover Benton Wesley.

While Scarpetta and Marino investigate a death and a family’s disappearance, a woman’s body is discovered in Massachusetts tattooed with red handprints — the same markings Lucy notices on the body of her latest pick-up. During Wesley’s Boston research project on serial killers’